Tuesday, 10 July 2012

How To Draw Comics REAL GOOD LIKE

I've done a few comics workshops lately for older students (GCSE-level) in which I've tried to focus a bit more on the specifics and mechanics of drawing than my usual "Hey Let's All Just Make Up Some Silly Nonsense and Have Fun" approach. (Not that there's anything wrong with Making Up Some Silly Nonsense and Having Fun, I hasten to add.) Anyway, I've also recently had a mini-spate of people asking for advice on drawing comics. There are some really great resources out there which I talk about in my workshops, so I thought for ease and convenience I'd link to them all here. Prepare yourselves... for the DROPPING of KNOWLEDGE.

Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work: a sort of
'cheat sheet' of effective panel layouts from the legendary EC
Cartoonist. I highly recommend studying these and indeed just nicking
them and using them in your comics for exciting and effective
compositions. These are available all over the
internet, here's a page that gives background on it and has several
hi-res versions of the file:http://joeljohnson.com/archives/2006/08/wally_woods_22.html

The Disney Comics Artist's Toolkit: another cheat sheet of
sorts; this one's a seven-page long kind of complete comics artists
training manual created as an internal presentation at Disney in the
1970's by comic artist Carson Van Osten. It's invaluable, and
remarkable, and covers everything from perspective and staging to panel
layout and figure construction - here's a
link that gives some background and has good-quality scans:http://sevencamels.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/comic-strip-artists-kit-redux.html

Those three links are literally the things I have printed out and taped up over my drawing board. Can't recommend them highly enough. FURTHER READING: some (highly) recommended books on the subject of making comics. Again, available from all good bookshops.

Anyway, hope all that is of some use to someone. Putting these links together was prompted by a recent visit to Teddington School, where I had a brilliant day doing workshops. One session was with a couple of Graphics classes who seemed weirdly knowledgeable about me and my work; check out what they had been doing a project on...

Which was rather hilarious, and did my ego no end of good, frankly. Huge thanks to Rachel Bide, Rachel Bannister and all the other
teachers who made it such a smoothly-run and enjoyable day!